CNN’s Daniel Dale Breaks Down the Latest ‘Frankly Ridiculous’ Russian Propaganda Claims: ‘Throwing So Much Nonsense at the Wall’

CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale broke down some of the latest Russian propaganda claims about the war in Ukraine on Monday, blasting the Kremlin for their “frankly ridiculous” efforts to throw “so much nonsense at the wall” in an effort to distract the world from the truth of the war crimes being committed.

Dale went through his analysis with The Lead host Jake Tapper, who is currently reporting from Lviv, Ukraine.

“The Russian government has claimed that not a single local resident was killed while Russian troops were in Bucha, that evidence to the contrary was staged or faked or a hoax,” said Dale. “These claims are frankly ridiculous. They’re totally false.”

He then went through some of the specific claims, telling viewers that he wanted to show “just how hard Russia and its allies have been working to trick people.”

Russian officials had claimed that early April videos of dead people on a street showed a person who was actually alive, claiming the hand was moving, said Dale. But journalists easily proved that the “so-called moving hand” was a drop of water moving across the windshield of the car from which the video was filmed, and also found still photos of that same body, clearly deceased.

The Russians then moved on to claim that the bodies had only appeared on that road after the Russian troops withdrew from the area, insinuating the Ukrainians had put them there.

“Satellite photos proved there had been bodies along the road for more than two weeks of the period when Russian troops were present,” said Dale.

That should have been the end of the story, Dale pointed out, with the satellite photo proof, but pro-Russian social media accounts and groups claiming to be fact-checkers began attempting to cast doubt on the satellite photos themselves, claiming the satellite company in question was not taking images on that date.

“But the company was taking pictures that day — either out of malice or out of ignorance, the people doing this so-called fact-check just weren’t properly doing their online archive search,” he said.

He then described how “exhausting” it was to follow all this propaganda, and how that was the Russian strategy:

This is exhausting for me to keep track of and this is my full-time job. So, I’m sure regular people around the world find it exhausting themselves to keep track of.

And I think that’s the point. I think what Russia is doing is throwing so much nonsense at the wall. That either some of it sticks and gets believed or that it all just tires people out. That people get so confused and overwhelmed by everything being contested. Even the most obvious seeming of facts, they throw up their hands and say I don’t know what’s true. I can’t keep track of all this. And I think we as journalists have to fight hard against that.

“Absolutely,” agreed Tapper, noting that “this deception obviously goes far beyond Bucha,” including a Russian state TV report that claimed it had a video showing Ukrainians getting ready to use a dummy as a fake corpse.

That was another “ridiculous” attempt, said Dale, who explained that the video actually came from the filming of a Russian television show.

Someone who worked on the production crew for the show spoke out on Facebook and Instagram about the misleading report, Dale said, joking about how their dummy “had become Russia’s most famous dummy.”

“It’s a pretty endless stream of false claims from Russia and its online supporters, and a lot of it is quite brazen,” Dale concluded.

Watch the video above, via CNN.